House of Representatives Committee

Several people have drawn attention to letters from the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to Mann, Bradley, Hughes, the director of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the chairman of the IPCC, which were posted up at the Committee website on Friday here.

The letters refer to the Wall Street Journal [this would presumably be the article of Feb. 14, 2005, in which Mann said that he would not be "intimidated" into releasing his algorithm, rather than the recent editorial], as well as to our articles. They have directed Mann, among other things, to produce his source code. In our E&E article, we pointed out several areas, where, in our opinion, MBH98 did not meet "full, true and plain disclosure" standards, which are routinely applied to securities offerings and promotions, e.g. the withholding of R2 and other verification statistics, the impact of the presence/absence of bristlecones (the CENSORED directory), the "editing" and misrepresentation of the Gaspé start date. Questions are asked specifically about these matters.

The questions are focussed on process, with particular emphasis on processes for validation and verification, issues which are obviously of interest to readers of this blog. The letters are well worth taking a look at.

I checked out the letter and there appears to be no gaps. The Committee even asks the director of the NSF what the policies are with regard to data archiving and the transparency of the research. An interesting question is also put to Dr Pachauri of the IPCC in regard to why Mann was allowed to insert his own research into the TAR and why there was no independent audit of his work.

I think we can look forward to some definitive answers. I think it’s unlikely that Mann, Bradley or Hughes will be able to “dodge the bullet” this time.

I’d say that Mann is a dead man walking at this point. I have some experience here and the director of the NSF will not be happy to be getting a letter like this, it’s a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare. You don’t want to find out that high profile research that your agency paid for wasn’t just wrong, which can happen through honest error or ignorance, but fiddled.

Mann must be very unhappy too. He can stiff the two of you but he can’t say no to the ultimate source of his funding, the Congress. The IPCC will get away with this because they will be able to say that Mann and company fooled them.

Adherence to facts allways pays off. Never mind the outcome of the investigation now launched , it´s of great help and reassurance to lay people like me trying to catch up with what is going on, that people like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick are not afraid to stand up to the pressure
from a sometimes fierce scientific community. And succeed. I´m sure that it will be clear to “both” sides of the debate, that never mind the outcome of the investigation, honest and real science will be the ultimate winner in the future. Once things have settled, I suppose that because such an investigation can be provoked, scientist will be much more careful not to give way to biased research, and that again could happen to be of great relief to ordinary people who might have their life negatively influenced because of bad science adopted by policymakers as the “truth”. So from one who are willing to accept whatever the truth is, just it´s the real truth, a big thanks to Steve Mcintyre and Ross McCitrick.

Congratulations. You’ve done a great job!
I found a post form Yury Izrael, Director, Global Climate and Ecology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences and IPCC Vice President in RIA Novosti:“Climate change: not a global threat”.

I hope that more scientists will be encouraged to speak out, so that the international community may recognize, that there is NO CONSENSUS in global warming and climate change.

I have made my comment at:http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2005%20June.htm#Bluff
well done!Steve: John, thank you for stopping in and for the kind references at numberwatch. We’re getting quite a bit of traffic from numberwatch. Cheers, StevePS for others: People who enjoy John’s way with words will also enjoy John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories; I’ve read all of them.

Michael Mann complained of intimidation. Now he really has something to complain about. If his data and algorithm now see the daylight, we will almost certainly be treated to more editorials in the NYT saying that the study was “fake, but accurate.” Reading the letters from the committee, I was suddenly transported into a 1950s western, and heard the cavalry charging in to save the day. It is not over yet, but I do not see how this request can be stonewalled, and if it is, it will be just as bad for them.

Steve,- You’ve done a great job. Congratulations! However, I have a suggestion. In A Summary of MBH98 Replication Issues you list a whole slew of issues with MBH. If you could generate a series of slides that show w/ and w/o effects of each of the points, I think it would be of great use to a lot of people. You have concentrated on a particular time interval, but in my opinion, the biggest problem lies with the merging of the historical record with the “instrumental record”. Just showing the differences of the historical record w/ and w/o merging of “instrumental record” and the balloon and satellite record ( as you have previously done, really puts the whole Global Warming issue in perspective, especially if you maintain the anomaly (suppressed) scaling the same. Yes, this does confront the Dr. Hansen contingent directly, but the time has come.